In the last “Best of the Blog” post, I collected posts about military history stories that have inspired aspects of my books.  This time around, I’d like to reminisce about some special ships in the books and in some cases the artists whose work helped bring them to life.  Artist names below link to their gallery pages on DeviantArt, a great community that I often browse for inspiration.

My very first book and very first ship, the Brevic corvette Anelace, mostly gave me fits about her name.  Naming Anelace was hard because she truly seemed like a character.  Those are names I agonize over, and good old Ana took a long time.

When Captain Heskan moved on to BRS Kite, he gained a much bigger ship and I took another step in laying out ship systems.  BRS Kite’s inspiration came from the great work of Joachim Sverd.  I assigned technologies to the various details in his design as shown below.

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Heskan had a big reason to switch ships again (no spoilers!), and this time he found himself in AV Elathra, inspired by the artwork of Orpheus7.  It was fun to invent technology around some of this ship’s most prominent features, like the long forward wings and what essentially looks like a keel at the bottom.

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By far my most detailed imagining of the interior of a ship came with Confidence Game’s Zanshin.  The artwork of Mike Doscher helped a lot.  Zanshin’s external cargo points and internal decks took some time to lay out, as you can see in the blog post Details of Zanshin.  As a bonus, you can read about where Zanshin’s shuttle got its name as well!

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It’s been a lot of fun to bring each of these ships into my stories.  I’ve thanked these artists before for letting me use their work, but I’m happy to highlight them once more and hopefully send a few folks their way.